Stumbling into the new media era

Update 7/25: Here’s a post from Charles Cooper at CNet News.com with his take on the Beet.TV panel about the future of video. He does a much better job than I did of articulating some of the Rubik Cube challenges facing media companies, all things discussed at Stanford.

My own post from the event:

On Tuesday afternoon, I was lucky enough to weasel my way onto a panel at Stanford on the future of online video. It was an impressive group of heavyweights in the field and I was easily the least informed and the closest to journalism’s Pleistocene period. The program was run by Beet.TV founder Andy Plesser and former CBS News President Andrew Heywood.

Big shots from, among others, CNET, MSNBC, YouTube, Portfolio, Salon – places known and emerging – spent three hours parsing the present to try to predict, as one of my colleagues used to say, the recent future.

There was a lot of lingo. If I could collect a buck every time anyone says “monetize” I wouldn’t need any more money. People refer to “cooked” and “baked in” a lot, meaning the way things are created. But it just made me hungry; fortunately there were some great brownies and homemade canned beets.

There was a reference to the “new news ecosystem”, mixing online and traditional, but I heard some of that new ecosystem clearly when Steve Grove, Google-owned YouTube’s head of news and politics, talked about getting video from “our Google people in Nigeria.” Newspapers used to have “people” in Nigeria. Some other interesting phrases encapsulating actual ideas: “productizing” (see monetizing), “nichification”, “hosted nichecast” (to describe YouTube), “audience clustering” and “syndicated distribution.” “Non-linear storytelling” is good. “Hosted news” by actual people hosts like network talent, passe. Also, “how do you fund class without mass?” (quality without an audience), and my personal favorite: “We thought we were on the ground floor with that but the elevator stayed pretty close to the lobby.”

Here’s what was striking, though maybe only to me: the issues being discussed by these genuine brainacs were the same ones I’ve heard come up at nearly every panel, forum and blogosphere discussion about on line content/the web/journalism I’ve horned in on.

A) Technology. These guys, and they were almost all guys, had plenty of opinions and experience with technology, and they’re already into some very cool toys, though those toys should not be, someone warned, “bolted-on innovations”. But they were unsure where that technology would take video and its audiences (except to the universally agreed upon “multiplatform.”)

B) Biz models. Where are they? Anyone seen those things hiding somewhere? YouTube is cleaning up, but, like web advertising in general, you can count on one hand the companies that are getting all the ad dollars. Get bought by one of them or starve. Viewers still, for the most part, don’t pay, those rotten ingrates.

C) Content. The theme I also hear at all of these things is that the future of journalism and, to some extent, larger content generation, will be a pro-am combination – amateurs providing digital information and professionals interacting with them…somehow. The spectrum runs from YouTube, where as Mr. Grove noted, people put up pretty much what they want and then the YouTube folks “curate it” (which means they don’t do much with it at the moment other than organize and tag it), to the more traditional control model where professionals accept receipt of information but control every aspect of how, where and when it appears.

So what’s the right pro-am mix? The whole concept of citizen journalism is still floating around waiting for a good example wave to carry it somewhere, and user-generated material has yet to be a huge hit within the media world unless someone with a Flip catches Brangelina running into a lamp post.

These worlds collided, but by design. You can read the tale yourself. But it was useful symbiosis. Without Aaron we would have had no evidence, and no story. Without us, Aaron would have had less ability to leverage his evidence to wring assurances and change from a public agency. We’ll see if Muni finally gets the kinks out but this was a pro-am partnership that meshed well and moved things along to a better place and greater public good. It was also kind of fun to watch.

We acted as more than just a repository and Aaron as more than just a passive donor. We worked together, back and forth, to make it happen. This seems to be using the strengths of both the pro and the am.

Does this seem like the kind of audience “engagement” we’re all looking for?